Nothing here is private, but it is personal. So I keep it here instead of on urbanist.typepad.com, so that it won't freak out people who just want a nice article about cities or transit or plants.

01/23/2011

dear a

Your plan was to fly to the city of Z to spend New Years with your new partner L at his parents' home. L was there at the airport, so eager to see you. But you weren't on the plane.

L called you, then called friends, who told him to call the police in your town. Finally he did. They went to your home, and found your body there. It appeared that while home, alone, you had used crystal meth, and then did some things that are dangerous even when sober.

The obituary says you were born in 1970, so you were 40, but on the dating site where you met L, it says you're 38. Many gay men lie about their age, but why lie by just two years? A microfib, too small to matter, what does that say?

For so much of your life, you were wrong. You were the wrong person for your wife, for your job, maybe even for your parents. After all you'd been through, the long guilt-ridden breakup with your wife, salvaging a relationship with your daughters, casting about looking for a new focus, and finally falling in love with L, everyone wanted to believe you'd arrived, found confidence, could be happy now.

But once you've lived in a world where everyone tells you you're wrong, you can never again be totally sure that you're right. You meet new friends like me, a new partner like L, captivate us with your childlike eagerness to finally feel alive. But something's always off, a tiny displacement like two years on your age, like a sliding window that won't quite stay in its groove, and could pop out at any time.

I wish I had told you that this sensation of everything being a little bit wrong is an important insight in Buddhism. It's a thing that we must learn to live with. It's a fact about the world, not just about ourselves, and certainly not about you, gentle A.

I've never believed in any notion of heaven or afterlife, but have always called myself agnostic about that. Now, in this sensation of grieving while being angry at you, I realize that you cannot possibly still exist as a spirit. Because if you did, you would know what you've done to your friends, and to your young daughters, and to your parents, and to L, and the horror of that would destroy whatever remained of your soft, warm heart. If you existed anywhere, in any form, you would be in agony beyond anything you'd ever known in your difficult life. So I have to hope that there is no particle of you large enough to catch such sensations. I have to hope that you are truly and utterly gone.

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Heartbreaking waste of a life. Sadly, another case of a man whose experiences of homophobia disenfranchised him from the rest of society, and as with so many in this community, found short term solace in unregulated, unsafe chemicals. Not only is the danger contained in the meth and its disinhibitions, but also in the potential for adding to the emotional and mentla health strains he was under.

The wreckage caused by drug and alcohol abuse is heart stopping. So many lives damaged in one desperate moment of euphoric despair. I don't know that your friend had a drug problem, maybe you don't know either...but the truth that our egos often won't accept is that no matter what we think it's a risk and it only takes one moment to die. I'm so sorry for everyone's loss here.

Timely, for me. The situations are completely different, but the results would be the same. I too am agnostic, but considering the volume of stuff that looks like counsel I feel like there must be a God of some sort, but I cannot understand His message.

I also don't know you other than from humantransit, but I feel moved by your beautiful description of the confusion that comes from someone too young leaving. This man's partner, daughters, family and friends' lives will never be the same, but in time the light of day will shine again.

I believe it is important to feel the anger that one feels in such circumstances so that one can also later feel the forgiveness that is necessary to remember the lost one with happiness.

Jarrett, that last paragraph really worries me. My take on this is quite different and I don't wish to confront but can't resist (I've tried, most of the day) putting another point of view.

Your belief in, or wish for (well motivated notwithstanding) annihilation of any spirit is from my view self (that's you) destructive. All spirit (mind) is joined.

A, in whatever state, cannot suffer unless A so chooses. Likewise, L and A's family, and yourself. Hurt cannot be inflicted if it is not accepted. All else then become lessons. Big lessons, for A, L, family, and yourself, and for me, and any others, trying to grapple with the density of the emotion here.

Seeking completion in time and space will fail, and hurt, but can be a great leap into understanding. A may look as if he took a backward step, but that is for him to resolve, as it is the others left. I wish him love and enlightenment, which is all he sought, if in all the wrong places, the context in which you use that word I suppose.

Obviously, this is the kind of terrain where religions part company and everyone must either find or invent their own truth. I understand the metaphysics that you propose, and on certain days I'd endorse it.

But for me, the transition from the A that I knew to an "all spirit" that is "joined" might as well be called annihilation. I cannot construct a concept of "all spirit" in which A remains present in any sense that means anything to me. But if you can, that's great.

Any sense in which A continues as a specific entity leads to the painful conclusion that I've described. He had enough trouble facing life's minor and ongoing guilt. To face the reality of having screwed up this badly and caused so much pain to the people who loved him would simply blow him to pieces. And a spiritual essence of A that would not have that experience is simply not A in any sense that matters, as seen from this side of death's foggy river, at least by me.

When constructing grief-managing myths, I'm more likely to imagine a place where A lives on as himself but without access to full knowledge of what he did in this life, and especially his last fateful surrender to loneliness. Some Vedic constructions of reincarnation work more or less like this. The spirit lives on without the memory. And yes, it would be nice to imagine A has that, that he's being born somewhere and will have a new shot at innocence. But with all respect to those who believe it, this feels too neatly constructed to solve my problems, and that's not how the universe works.

Again, this is not a judgment on anyone else's view. Just mine, and the various grief experiences down through the decades don't seem to change it.

The 'all spirit' concept I envisage is just that, all spirit, and yes that does mean the elimination of A, and everyone else, but not their spirit, but their ego, their belief in separateness. I think we could easily agree here, just dancing around the words.

In terms of A dealing with what he has done, it is conjecture (and false I think) that he will be destroyed by what he has done, to himself and others. Spirit can't be destroyed. But the false 'he', the A who thinks he's A, not a part of the whole, can certainly be eliminated, but not by guilt, only by love, acceptance, of self not as self but as a part of the whole. Guilt will not blow his ego apart, but feed it.

If A lives on in denial of what he has done, then it is not because the knowledge isn't there, but because he is denying it. Spirit without memory, with the veil down, is not holy spirit (sic) to my way of thinking.

The universe works how the ego makes it, not the other way 'round. My belief is that we are the dreamer of the dream, not the product of the dream.

That you are grieving is so sad, grieve gently, loving yourself, and A. I hope I'm not starting to sound preachy, I hate that, but words and their subtleties are hard enough, especially over the net.